Glostra blog

After spending considerable time inside in the company of books and mostly theoretical articles, one may easily become a bit of a book-worm. That is, lose the 'touch' on things. The world (I said it, uh) becomes something not only seen through theoretical glasses, but one in which theory really matters, almost all the time. Therefore it was a real delight to actually do something, for once (articulated in structuralist-mythological language this 'doing' could be expressed as something like a series of utterances in a zero-order language). The task was to take part in this year's vendimia.

Ended up viewing this during my weekend hassle.

Ok, this might be a long shot, but I'll let it go anyway. After a long weekend of homo oeconomicus -bashing at Philosophy of Management conference, I could not but read Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization with the same glasses on. Naturally, he discusses madness (which is far from economics), quoting Louis-Sébastien Mercier:

Once again a public lecture put forward a combination of views. This time the topic was: 'The Future of Picturing the World: filming and imaging in a global era'.

Associated with some themes of this blog, I just came across this video...

Attending a talk last week about contingency in science (held as part of CPNSS project ‘Contingency and Dissent in Science) left me rather confused. As I found it, the concept of contingency, at least at the LSE, seems to be a name (or a subset-not in a strictly set-theoretical sense!) of the nowadays quite classical realism-antirealism debate. That is, I found no references to Rorty. Although quite understandable, it still seems odd to pass the ‘practical turn' of the 1980s in one sentence, just slightly overlooking some significant parts of more recent developments in philosophy. On the other hand, the bent is quite reasonable considering the institutional traditions.

Consider LSE's slogan: rerum cognoscere causas ("to know the causes of things", ripped from Virgil, I suppose). It makes a direct claim favouring causal explanation. Another matter, however, more rooted in the Anglo-American tradition is the tendency to embrace methodological individualism (individuals matter).

A weird thing has taken place a couple of times now... I have been to a very weak lecture and asked some of my peers their opinions about them. To my surprise, I generally get totally contrasting views of my own. People tend to be extremely fascinated about those lectures I mostly dislike.

Auguste Comte memorial lecture was given today by Prof. Philippe Van Parijs. The topic was interestingly ‘European Democracy and the Language Question'. Despite democracy being interesting and all, what appeared to me to be the most striking insight of his talk was the whole discussion around European Union, unified (political) decision-making bodies and the apparent question of lingua franca. Van Parijs is also originally from Belgium, a country struggling with severe problems of identity, language and governance, so he also has some additional weight in his words.

Now that a week has passed after the London-crippling 10 cm snowfall, it is time to look back, just a little bit. The question that seems to be the most pressing here seems to be the cost of the snow to the economy. In other words, how much did everyone (?) lose because of the white fluffy thing?